Middle East & North Africa

LUND, Sweden (IDN-INPS) - Russia announced on September 8 that it has decided to go where angels fear to tread – into the whirlpool of negotiations between Palestine and Israel. Long a preserve of the Americans and the French, the attempt to bring peace between the two and to make a final settlement on boundaries has frustrated them for decades. Can Russia do better?

Russia comes on the scene at a time when the script is perhaps about to be re-written in a radical way. After decades of negotiating around the premise that the only solution was a two-state arrangement with an independent Jewish state and an independent Palestinian state existing cheek by jowl, opinion in Palestine is shifting.

JERICHO (IDN | PNN) - Israeli government officials have announced further measures against nonviolent actions by civil society. During the First Intifada, the Israeli occupation authorities deported non-violent activists and tried to prevent any peaceful demonstration against the imposed and oppressive policies.

Nowadays, Israel, with some international support, is trying to quash a growing solidarity movement with the Palestinian cause for freedom and independence.

AMMAN (IDN) - Two years after the Gaza conflict, paucity of sufficient funds is hampering a speedy clearance of Explosive Remnants of War (ERW) that pose a serious threat to the life and physical integrity of the population in the tiny self-governing Palestinian territory.

During the 2014 conflict, Israel launched more than 6,000 airstrikes and fired nearly 50,000 tank and artillery shells in the 51-day operation in Gaza, killing 1,462 Palestinian civilians, a third of them children.

The United Nations Independent Commission of Inquiry's report on Gaza conflict, published on June 22, 2015, found that Palestinian armed groups fired 4,881 rockets and 1,753 mortars towards Israel in July and August 2014, killing 6 civilians and injuring at least 1,600.

GENEVA (IDN) - Yemen, an Arab country in Western Asia, has been undergoing a civil war since 2015 causing huge suffering. The United Nations has been at pains to encourage the conflicting parties to come to a lasting agreement in talks that have been hosted by Kuwait for the past three months.

In a statement announcing one-month break in negotiations – between a Yemeni Government delegation and a delegation of the General People's Congress and Ansar Allah – on August 6, UN Special Envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed assured that the process will enter a “new phase,” during which “the focus will be on working with each side separately to crystalize precise technical details”.

NEW YORK (IDN) - The UN General Assembly is coming under strong pressure to declare 2017 as the International Year to End Israeli Occupation of Palestine, particularly in the aftermath of the July 2016 report by the Middle East Quartet – comprising the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations.

Ambassador Feda Abdelhady-Nasser, Deputy Permanent Observer at the Permanent Observer Mission of Palestine to the United Nations, told the Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP) on August 4 that Gaza would be uninhabitable by 2020 if its humanitarian situation was not addressed.

CAIRO (IDN) – Though nuclear blustering has remained hollow, Saudi Arabia has again increased its weapons imports and stood as the main catalyst for a climb of 10 percent (or $6.6 billion) in global weapons sales in 2015, according to a recent defence report. The rise is the latest sign betraying the level of anxiety in the conservative kingdom over what Saudi officials say is a threat from Iran.

The Saudis have recently been particularly rattled by the advances of Iranian foreign policy in the Middle East. Especially worrisome were the successes of Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria.

For Syrian refugees in Jordan, integration into the Jordanian society is fraught with challenges. Mistrust and rumours taint how each group perceives the other. A project by UN Women organized football camps for adolescent girls, where Jordanian and Syrian girls built friendships and social cohesion.

UN Women News Feature

NEW YORK (IDN-INPS) - Rawan and Samah have much in common. They are about the same age; they live in the same city – Mafraq, in northern Jordan – just a short drive from the Syrian border. They are loving, dedicated mothers to daughters who go to the same school. They share similar responsibilities, joys, and struggles in their daily lives. But one crucial difference sets them a world apart.

GENEVA (IDN) - More than 10,000 specialist doctors have left Syria, which is plagued by a persistent conflict now in its sixth year. About 40% of the population is therefore without access to primary healthcare, according to Syrian doctors representing the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations (UOSSM).

The situation is rather critical in Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, which is home to about one million civilians. It is left with one doctor each for more than 3,300 civilians. In the eastern part of the city, which is besieged by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, more that 7,350 people have just one doctor at their service.

ANKARA (IDN) – The fourth and latest military coup in the history of the Turkish Republic ended at 8:02 p.m. on Saturday, July 16, less than 24 hours after it had begun. It was bloody. And it failed.

Hardly a week later, the state of emergency has been declared, tens of thousands of state and military personnel have been dismissed and three million servants recalled from holidays.

As the Turkish people recover from the psychological shock following the events, questions and all kinds of theories fill the discussions in the squares, cafés and social media. They are wondering “why” and “why now”? And then, “what is next”? All this on the assumption that everyone agrees with the answer to the question “who did it”?

GENEVA (IDN) - The UN-mediated peace negotiations for Yemen led by Ismail Ould Cheikh in Kuwait move ahead slowly. The 13-month war was at first between Hauthis tribal forces loyal to the former president Ali Abdallah Saleh and those supporting the current president Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi who had been Saleh’s vice-president for many years. The war is a struggle for power but is not an ideological-religious-tribal conflict.

Into this conflict has come a Saudi Arabian-led military coalition using bombs and sophisticated weapons. (According to Yemen’s khabaragency.net website, on July 14, a Saudi F-16 warplane crashed in the west-central Yemeni province of Sana’a, killing one of its pilots. The incident took place in the province’s Nihm district, with one unnamed source saying it had been brought down by Houthi fighters. "The Yemeni army's air defense force and Popular Committees targeted a Saudi F-16 warplane on July 14 night and managed to down it in the Nihm district east of the capital Sana'a," the source was reported as saying.)